//------------------------------//
// 1 - Vern 
// Story: Grouchisaurus Rex 
// by Baal Bunny 
//------------------------------//

"No, no, no, no, no!" Scrolls, quills, and books flew everywhere, a yellowish light surrounding them, and Petunia made a noise halfway between a grunt and a howl. "I need the Magical Compendium, volumes one through thirty-six! Where is it?"

Vern gently set down the bag he was holding—Dusty had winked at him before rehearsal and told him to be more careful with the props—and rushed to his mark beside Petunia just as she spun to face the bookshelves. Her horn glowed to fling six or seven small books away, then the big one came sliding out. Keeping his focus on it, Vern put on his most dismayed expression followed by his most determined one, braced himself, and spread his front claws to catch the giant book when Petunia cut her power.

"Flash cards!" she shouted right on cue, and the book dropped.

Reaching for it, trying to stagger, trying to collapse onto the stage, trying to pretend the thing weighed more than an empty paper sack and was actually crushing him, Vern get ahead of himself and started to fall before he'd actually caught the book. He corrected quickly and grabbed for it, but the thing was so light, it spun away from him like a balloon, bounced off the backdrop, and smacked the floorboards with a hollow and echoing thump.

"Hold it," Dusty's gravelly voice called from the other side of the footlights, and Vern froze, his eyes clenching shut.

Every time! It didn't matter what scene they were doing, either from the beginning like this or from the end when he had to ride Grease Paint in her Princess Cadance costume right between the hooves of the big King Sombra puppet that Marionette had built, Vern always found a way to mess something up!

A hoof touched the ridge of scales between his stubby wings. "It's okay, Vern," Dusty said, and Vern looked up to see the director smiling down at him. "Not your fault you went through the molt and had that growth spurt. We just need to—"

"Wyvern!" cried a very familiar voice from the back of the theater. "Oh, my goodness! Are you all right?"

"He's fine," another familiar voice answered, and Vern looked past the footlights to see Mira Belle and Twilight rushing down the aisle toward the stage.

Though really, only Mira was rushing, the air wavering around her horn. "Please, Wyvern!" A silver flash engulfed her, and with another flash, she burst from the empty air beside him, her golden eyes wide and, as of two days ago, on the same level as Vern's when he stood up straight. "Tell me you're okay!"

"Mira Belle!" Twilight's sharp tone folded Vern's ears, and he couldn't help but notice the similar reaction from everypony on the stage. It was easy to forget who Twilight really was—or maybe it was more truthful to say that Twilight made it easy to forget who she really was. But when she spoke like that, there was no forgetting that one of Equestria's five princesses was in the room.

A good thing, too, Vern thought with a grin. Twilight in full princess mode was sometimes the only pony Mira would listen to. Like now, for instance, the way the little gray unicorn froze in her hoofprints, her heart hammering loud enough in the suddenly silent theater for Vern to hear it.

Twilight cleared her throat, and her next words came out at a more usual volume: "You know Dusty's rules about who gets to be on stage, and you know very well why he has those rules."

"I do." Mira hung her head and made a slow quarter turn to glance up through her chocolate-brown mane at the director. "I'm sorry, Dusty."

Dusty's chuckle sounded like a can of rocks tumbling down a hill. "On behalf of the Ponyville Community Theater, Mira, I accept your apology. But we'll have to take five here, troupe, till we can get—"

"The Magical Compendium?" The laugh was back in Twilight's voice. "Volumes one through thirty-six?" With a toss of her head, a giant book drifted over the lip of the stage, the unmistakable purple of her magic shimmering around it.

Vern gaped. Sure, growing up in Twilight's castle, he'd seen lots of old books—Mira had been Twilight's student for longer, actually, than Vern could remember since it was Mira hatching his egg during her entrance exam to Princess Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns that had brought Mira and Twilight together—but this book looked way older than most. The magic floating around it tickled his nose like dust and made his new wings twitch.

Then the words Twilight had said clicked in his mind, and Vern looked from the book to the princess. "That...that's the real one, isn't it? The actual book you went looking for back before your trip to Canterlot when Princess Celestia told you about the Crystal Empire for the first time."

"Almost." Twilight smiled. "This is the one I ordered as a replacement copy after Tirek blew up the original along with the old Golden Oaks Library." She set a front hoof on the book's cover. "It's the same edition and everything, though, so it's as close as I could get. And if it's all right, Dusty, I'd like to contribute it to the theater for the duration of the play's run."

A moment of silence, then Dusty shook himself. "Twilight, that...that's wonderful! Thank you so much! But..." He set a hoof beside hers on the cover of the book, and for all that the earth pony was nearly as tall as her, he was all lanky legs: Twilight's hoof was maybe half again as big as his. "You know we're gonna be dropping it from that shelf during every performance, right? I wouldn't want to break it—or for it to break Vern."

Twilight's face lit up even further. "That's the best part! Grimoires like this are designed to be really tough, so you don't need to worry about hurting it. And?" Her horn flashed, and something about the book changed. Vern cocked his head at it and flared his nostrils. It still looked the same and smelled the same, but it sat differently on the stage, the air seeming to flow more slowly around it. Or something...

"Its weight is magically adjustable!" Twilight was going on. "I can teach Marionette the spell, and that way, you can make it however heavy or light it needs to be to work in the scene!"

"Well, now." Dusty bent down, slipped his front hooves under the book, and hefted it up and down a few times before looking over his shoulder at Vern. "Wanna give it a try?"

Stepping forward, Vern took the book in his foreclaws and lifted it easily from the stage. "That's no better than the phony one we've been using." His ears folded at how whiny he sounded. "I mean, can we maybe make it a little heavier?"

Dusty chuckled again. "Not exactly a Stallionslavski method actor, are you, Vern?"

Vern blinked at him, but Twilight laughed, so he guessed it must be some grown-up joke. Before he could ask them what it meant, though, Twilight's horn glowed, and the book began gaining weight in Vern's claws. "Say when," she said.

Raising it and lowering it a few times, Vern waited till it felt good and solid in his grip. "There." He gave Twilight a grin and a nod. "This'll make it so much easier! Thanks, Twilight!" A thought struck him then, and he turned to Petunia, sitting with the other actors in the Golden Oaks Library set. "It's not too heavy for you, is it, Petunia?"

Petunia tossed her head, the bob of her purple and magenta wig whisking around her shoulders. "Anything the part calls for, I can do." She planted her hoofs, flared her horn, and Vern let the book go when he felt her magic tug at it. It drifted upward with a bit of a wobble, and Petunia gave a laugh. "Which is what we call—" she started to say.

Everypony in the troop finished it, Vern joining in as well: "Acting!"

"Brilliant!" Dusty gave the required response, then he turned his smile toward Mira Belle, blinking her big eyes where she still sat at stage left. "So, if we could please have all non-acting personnel clear the boards, we'll take it from the top."

Mira's blush always made Vern think of a forest fire, the way it spread so fast and red over her gray face. He stepped forward quickly and wrapped a hug around her. "Thanks, Mira. Knowing you're watching out for me is the best feeling in the world."

He thought for a moment that she was trembling, but then she nuzzled his neck and disappeared. Looking around, he saw her silver flash go off next to Twilight out in the front row of seats.

"Places!" Dusty called, and Vern scrambled to join the others. And not only did the scene go perfectly, but when Dusty said he wanted to run through Twilight's Failure Song from the end of Act One before calling it a day, Vern didn't so much as let himself groan. He just took his mark, did the little dances as well as he could, and hit his harmony parts right when and where he was supposed to: he even got a smile from Petunia when they wrapped up, something he was sure the perfectionist pony had never given him before.

"Y'see?" she said, touching a hoof to the tip of his snout. "Acting."

"Brilliant," Vern said automatically.

"You know it, kid." Laughing, she levitated her wig to Button Hook, Marionette's assistant in the prop department, and started for the stage door.

"OK, troupe!" Dusty was shouting backstage. "Full dress tomorrow, so bring your brains with you!"

The rest of the cast and crew were heading into the wings as well, but Vern made for the house instead, for the two ponies seated in the front row of the otherwise empty building. They were both smiling, but Mira was practically vibrating in place, her front hooves pressed together below her chin. "Oh, Wyvern! You were so wonderful up there! I would never be able to sing in front of other ponies like that!"

Vern shrugged, glad yet again that his scales didn't show it when he blushed.

"Yes," Twilight said, her voice soft and her gaze fixed on the stage where Marionette's crew was raising the Canterlot Tower set into the rafters. "The whole production is incredible." She took a breath, shook her head, and something like her regular smile came back. "I know I say it every time Dusty does one of these shows, but Petunia makes a better me than I ever did."

"Twilight..." Mira's stern look came over her face. "You know that's not true."

Bending down, Twilight touched her horn to Mira's. "But it's funny, so that makes it okay." She turned and started up the aisle. "Now! Back home for supper, then evening lessons for you, Mira, and bed for our master thespian!"

Which was more than fine with Vern: after a day of rehearsing, he always felt like he'd run from the West Ponyville Branch of the library to the new East Ponyville Branch and back. By the time they got to the castle, he was already yawning, so he ate his amethyst almandine, let Mira kiss him good night, dragged himself upstairs to her room, collapsed into his basket—

And suddenly found that he couldn't keep his eyes shut.

He tried for what seemed like a couple hours, curling up tight and pretending he was back in his egg, then stretching out wide enough to actually touch the edges of his round mattress with both his front paws and his back paws, but neither position worked. It was like he had a beehive inside him or something, thoughts of all the things he had to do in this play tickling at him.

Because this wasn't like the other times he'd been Spike in Dusty's shows. He didn't just have a couple lines to memorize and a few funny bits. This was The Return of the Crystal Empire! Spike was the hero of this one! Which meant that Vern had a song and dance to do with Petunia and that whole thing with Sombra's scary door in the basement of the palace and a bunch of stunts at the end and...and everything!

More awake now, he was sure, than he'd ever been in his whole entire life, he rolled out of his basket and padded over the carpeting to the door. Maybe if he went downstairs to Twilight's study and curled up under the table where Mira was having her lessons, that would help. Most of what those two talked about put him right to sleep anyway.

Pulling the door open, he squinted into the light that always glowed through the hallways here...and something stroked against him and through him both at the same time.

It wasn't a scent exactly and it wasn't a sound and it wasn't five or six other things, either. But it made parts of his brain sit up and start clicking, parts that normally sat there and didn't do anything unless—

"Yes!" Turning, he sprinted down the hallway for the back stairs, jumped down them three at a time till he came to the basement level, then scrambled on all fours around the boxes that filled the castle's underground storeroom. At the far end, the gigantic double doors that had sat there dark and closed and silent for almost a whole month were now thrown open, and Vern bounded inside. The walls shimmered, torchlight reflecting from the gold and gems piled on the floor. And lounging on top of that pile, huge and purple and green and scaly— "Spike!" Vern yelled, leaping for the other dragon.

Spike had a book delicately balanced between his foreclaws, and he swung his big head toward Vern at just exactly the right speed for Vern to grab his friend's rounded snout and haul himself up. "Vern!" Spike said in his rumbling voice. "Wait a minute. I was only gone three weeks! How can you be that much taller?"

Laughing, Vern spun on the end of Spike's nose. "You were gone four weeks! I had my molt, and now it's like all my growing's happening at once! I mean, if I stand on my tippy-tip claws and stretch my neck, I'm almost as tall as Mira Bella now!"

The chuckle that rolled up Spike's neck jiggled Vern around so much, he had to laugh himself. "I still remember the first time I could peek over Twilight's head without standing on my tip-claws." He waved a paw, the torches flickering in the breeze it stirred up. "And now look at me!"

Vern couldn't help looking—Spike had said to, after all—and like always, he was just plain amazed. All the way from the ridge at the top of Spike's head to the pointy end of his tail, Spike was bigger than some of the buildings in Ponyville. And even though Vern had heard Spike tell the story fifteen or twenty times probably, he'd watched the movie on his memory pad even more times than that: some documentary crew had filmed it a hundred and fifty years ago when Twilight had hired a bunch of Diamond Dogs to dig out Spike's room and the tunnel that led to his private entrance out in the Everfree Forest.

It always made Vern swallow when he looked at Spike, and with the way he'd grown recently, he couldn't help asking, "Am I really gonna get as big as you someday?"

"Could be." Spike brought a foreclaw up and touched Vern's back in that surprisingly gentle way he had. "Once your wings come in, well, the sky's the limit."

Normally, Vern would've groaned at the joke, but the rest of what Spike had said made him shout, "No!" instead.

The whole cavern suddenly went quiet, Spike's chest stopping in mid-breath. "Whaddaya mean by that?" he asked.

Vern's ears folded, something odd and brittle in Spike's voice. "I...I just mean that you're the biggest and strongest and best dragon that ever was," Vern managed to say. "And I...it wouldn't be right for me to ever get bigger'n you. That...that's all, Spike, really: that's all I was saying."

Spike's chest sort of sank, and a greenish-black puff of smoke rolled from his nostrils. "Yeah, well, a long, long time ago, they used to call me 'little Spikey-Wikey,' y'know."

"What?" Vern looked down along Spike's whole length again. "Who would've called you that?"

Another gust of smoke rose, but this time it came from Spike's pursed lips, a silvery, diamond-shaped cloud drifting toward the ceiling. "Never mind," he said. "Now, what's all this I hear about you pretending to be me? You trying to steal my hoard again?"

It was another joke, Vern knew, but thinking about the play made him want to hop up and down some more. "We're doing the whole story about the return of the Crystal Empire this time! Princess Cadance and Princess Flurry Heart are both gonna come for opening night, and...and you're gonna be in town, right? To come and see it?"

The quiet this time felt different somehow: sharper if silence could even be sharp. "I dunno, Vern." Spike's attention was focused on the smoke diamond slowly drifting apart as it wavered upwards and vanished among the stalactites. "I mean, I'll try, sure, but I might have to head out if there's, y'know, a big emergency somewhere."

"Well, yeah." Vern swallowed. "But...if there isn't?"

Blinking, Spike's big eyes rolled down to meet Vern's gaze, and a smile touched his snout. "I wouldn't miss it, Vern."